A polyglot YouTube sensation with 6.65M subscribers, Xiaoma has become known in the last few years for popular videos where he surprises people by speaking their language, whether it’s Mandarin, Urdu, Twi, or another of the 68 total languages he has learned. He travels the world engaging with people and celebrating their cultures. The most recent audiences he surprised, though, were made up of Gen Alpha high school students and Gen Z college graduates in the U.S.
Xiaoma spent weeks learning Gen Alpha slang, he said–where some of the slang itself is AAVE that has since been appropriated–and delivered speeches at Philadelphia’s Westtown School for their Language Week and Ohio State University for their Multilingual Language Education commencement ceremony. Amid his own self-aware, self-described nerdiness, many audience members peppered his speeches with appreciative laughter, but there were still messages in both that stood out.
To Westtown, Xiaoma shared that “it occurred to me that all of you are already in some sense multilingual, whether you realize it or not, and that’s because you speak the Gen Alpha dialect of English,” he said, adding that language opens up the world for people, expanding their knowledge of culture, giving them new connections and points of view. Or, as he shared in Gen Alpha slang, “Picking up another language gives you front row seats to how people around the world give the deets. It’s like unlocking infinite drip, allowing you to catch dubs across cultures, connect deeper with the squad and stan new perspectives that would otherwise leave you ghosted.”
To Ohio State University graduates, Xiaoma conveyed how important it was that these rising educators seek to understand their students and keep learning themselves, again by using the aforementioned slang. “When you talk to someone in their own language, you just ate and left no crumbs. You feel snatched just knowing you understand a whole new world,” he said. “Because your students may not remember your worksheets, but they’ll never forget the day you spoke their language.”
What’s even better is that in the YouTube video, Xiaoma offers subtitles for all of the elders in the Internet audience, be they millennial, boomer, or what have you. People were appreciative of them, too. “I laughed when he said he would include subtitles in standard English, until I realized I needed it,” one commenter wrote on YouTube. “We appreciate your efforts to preserve these rare languages,” wrote another.
Though there’s a generational divisiveness that runs between Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Millennial, and Boomer culture that’s been heavily articulated in the last few years, a speech like this points more toward a mutual understanding than a mutual separation.
And yes, it’s fun, funny, and occasionally (purposely) funny-cringey listening to Xiaoma, by his own admission an “aging, 34-year old millennial,” take on slang, some of it much older than Gen Alpha. But the truth behind it all is that learning a language allows people to form links to each other and to lives they might not have known otherwise. If slang can be used to illustrate such a concept and begin to bridge a generational divide, all the better.
